Demand Generation That Actually Works for Advisors with Alex Khassa

[00:00:16] Doug Heikkinen: I've known you for a little while, but for those who don't, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what drove you to start Clients Blackbox.

[00:00:25] Alex Khassa: Yeah, I think we met at the Nitrogen event last year, sometime around this time.

[00:00:29] Doug Heikkinen: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:00:30] Alex Khassa: Cool. So my name is Alex, founder of Clients Blackbox. Before starting Clients Blackbox, I was essentially offering digital marketing services as an individual freelancer for six years. And in 2020 there was a huge demand for digital marketing services.

So I found myself at the end of that year with about 50 clients. Three were financial advisors, 47 weren't. And those three financial advisors, they had an incredible return with our strategies, which we still use today. They had a 10x return, and at that point they were very basic. While the other 47, some had success, some didn't.

So I decided to double down on working just with financial advisors. That's why I started Clients Blackbox in 2021 with what we had working back then. And now we've developed it so much further and built up more success stories.

[00:01:21] Doug Heikkinen: That's fantastic. you talk a lot about demand generation rather than demand capture.

What do you mean by that and what's that? Why is that distinction important for RIAs?

[00:01:34] Alex Khassa: Yeah, it's very important in digital marketing. Demand generation versus demand capture. I can give you some examples. Demand generation is, you're going after people who don't even know that they need a financial advisor or your specific way of helping them with retirement planning or financial planning. Versus demand capture, you're going after the convinced, the people who are looking for cashflow planning or retirement planning or whatever philosophy you have. Demand capture is important to have set up in your marketing funnel overall so that you're not losing on the people that are easy wins, low hanging fruit, but it's hard to scale.

Demand capture, an example of that would be running a Google ad to the keyword financial advisor in x, y, z city. That's demand capture. Somebody who's looking for a financial advisor. But the amount of people that are looking for a financial advisor versus the amount of people that can use a financial advisor but are not necessarily looking, that's a multiple orders of magnitude larger.

So by using a demand generation approach, you're able to scale your marketing further than just using demand capture. And that is able to help you scale your firm further, more profitably, than just looking after the people that are easy, low hanging fruit.

[00:02:48] Doug Heikkinen: Walk us through the experience of working with Clients Blackbox during a client campaign for those who don't know what it does, from first touch to booking a meeting.

[00:02:59] Alex Khassa: Yeah. So we're all about demand generation, with some demand capture, and that's all about education. When you work with us, what we create for you is an end-to-end educational funnel that takes somebody from not knowing who you are, what you do, why we can help them, what problems they have that you can solve for them, to knowing who you are, what you do, what problems you can solve for them, and then having them booked in your calendar.

And the way we do that, is we create a short, educational video that we script for you. We've scripted 3,500 of these over the past four years. You record it on camera, we edit it for you. That video is shown as a social media ad on Facebook and Instagram, primarily. Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram, has been the most reliable platform for us to spend and get appointments up consistently and reliably at scale.

We've tried other platforms. Nothing beats Meta so far today, as of October, 2025. So that is shown as a 90 second video ad. That leads to prospect to another landing page that has a 10 minute educational video. That video, the most important thing that video does is it gets their attention and educates them on a problem that you'll solve for them.

It's not just about making an offer of, Hey, I'll build you a free financial plan, or I will give you, a stress test to your portfolio, or do a retirement risk review. Those are nice. That's more demand capture. Demand generation is more about, Let me educate you about this specific problem and the cost of not solving it and what life can look like if you do solve it.

That allows you to have conversations with people that are not saying, Hey, what's the thing you're trying to sell me? Versus, Hey, I have that problem. How can you solve that for me? And that's an easier conversation to turn into a client versus the other way. So that 10 minute educational video, again, educates them on the problems so you can help solve for them, gives them some general guidelines on ways that can solve that problem that may align with your planning philosophy, and invites them to book an appointment, a consultation with you.

And the way they book that appointment is they don't submit a form where you have to reach out to them and you chase them. They go to your Calendly, your Schedule One, whatever tool you use. They fill out or choose a date and time when they want to meet with you to zoom meeting.

And then they tell you how much they have investible assets, what's their biggest concern, and other qualifying criteria that might be important to you, whether it's income, assets, do they have an advisor, do they not? And then after that, they go to the last step, which is more of a nurture sequence, trying to prepare them for the meeting to let them know that, Hey, for most of our clients, they're fiduciary planners. Hey, we're not going to sell you anything on the call. We're just trying to see if we can help you. And if we can, we'll build a complimentary plan for you, if we can, to point you better in a better direction. So that's the overall experience for a prospect for them, from not knowing who you are to book on your calendar.

And the good thing about this is you record the videos once and it works for you 24/7. You don't have to be in a seminar presentation every day. You don't have to be telling your story over and over one-on-one. You record it once, it's captured on video, and it's distributed to thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of people that can see that and decide if they want to be part of what you're doing or not.

[00:06:14] Doug Heikkinen: That's fantastic. How do you identify and target affluent pre-retirees before they even realize they need planning?

[00:06:23] Alex Khassa: Yeah, that's a great question. So most people, they're going to use the Facebook targeting mechanisms, which are available to everybody. You can go to Facebook ads and type in financial advisor retirement plan, and Facebook will allow you to target people that are looking for ads.

So we do use that for sure. The second way we target is, over the past four years, we've booked more than 30,000 appointments between pre-retirees and financial advisors. We use that list, that database, as a lookalike audience on Facebook. So we're able to create an audience of one to 5 million people that look like those people, and that helps us target those people better.

So Facebook looks at those 30,000 people, looks at the similarities between them and finds more people that are outside of that list in the larger audience that are similar to them. That helps us a lot. And the third way, which is a new way, we have intent databases. So this year Facebook changed a lot.

There's the Andromeda update the summer, financial services category, which a lot of people were affected by, which really, limited the ways we can target. So we've been able to go and purchase access to databases from large data brokers, and we have a software that allows us to narrow down what we're looking for.

So I can go to my software and say, Hey, I want to target people who are 40 plus years old, doctors earning more than $250,000 a year. I'm able to do that, build that database, export it directly into Facebook, have it refresh daily, and be able to target those people specifically, and lookalikes of that.

Also, I have the intent. I know that those people have looked for financial planning, budgeting, retirement planning, in the past 10 days. So it's very fresh. They've expressed intent in the category of services that you offer. I'm also obviously able to do that with people who are 55 and above with over a million dollars net worth who have looked for a retirement planner or an annuity or an investment plan in the past 10 days, and be able to target them specifically with lookalikes to that.

So it's Facebook's audiences, it's our database, and it's also purchased intent databases that we're able to sync directly with Facebook and target the right people with the right message.

[00:08:35] Doug Heikkinen: Compliance is always a big concern for financial service marketing for advisors. How do you build marketing campaigns for RIAs that stay inside regulatory boundaries and make them feel comfortable?

[00:08:48] Alex Khassa: Yeah, that's a very common question. My response is, we can help most RIAs because they have, either their own internal compliance department or an outsourced one. If people, if an advisor currently, if they're with a large broker dealer or like a super large RIA that does not want you to market, that's a little difficult to get things approved by them, but it's the basics.

It's just not promising returns. It's not saying the trigger keywords like "guaranteed" or "peace of mind" or being promissory in any way. It's being able to educate people without making an offer to buy anything. And the whole message is perceived as an educational video versus a pitch for a security or an investment product or insurance policy, which we don't do.

So we've dealt with, dozens, maybe at this point, over a hundred compliance departments, and we're able to get things approved at this point typically from the first get go. But sometimes with just a couple of minor tweaks with adding disclosures at the end.

[00:09:49] Doug Heikkinen: Yep. Everybody's different. What metrics matter most in your business and in your client engagements?

[00:09:55] Alex Khassa: Yeah. For our clients, the end metrics they're looking at are, what's it cost me to get a client? What's the cost per acquisition? What's the value of that client, okay? And how much of that value am I capturing the first year versus 10, 20 years?

For example, if you're a fee only advisor and you're charging a planning fee, you might charge five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars for a planning fee, or less, that first year, plus you have the trail recurring revenue of the AUM. Plus, the sales cycle, how long does it take for me to close a client? The longer it is, the worse it is.

The, faster it is, the better my payback period is. And for us to lead to those metrics, there are leading indicators like, what's my cost per booked meeting? What's my show ratio? How many of those meetings are actually showing up? What's the qualification ratio of the people that are showing up?

How many are qualified? How many meetings does it take me to close, a prospect? And I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but the average client size, average client value for that first year, those are all important metrics that can allow a financial advisor to determine how a marketing campaign is working for them, how well it's working for them.

And all of that can come back to return on investment in a certain period of time. So am I making more than what I'm spending? Is it profitable? And also another metric, which is harder to measure is scalability. The easy answer for that is, can you do 10 times more than what you're doing right now? And how easy would that be? Or how hard would it be? For example, if you're using strategies to get clients like messaging via LinkedIn, right? You're going to probably be capped towards the LinkedIn cap, right? There's, I think it's 200 messages a week. If you're using seminars you're probably might be able to do 50% more, maybe twice as many seminars, but it would be hard for you to do 10 times more seminars as an individual. You have to hire more people, things like that.

Versus if you have more like an evergreen funnel that's getting you appointments with a prerecorded message, that's getting you appointments on a daily basis, you're able to potentially 10 times your spend in a relatively reasonable period of time and 10 times your appointments that are booked on your calendar.

So those are the metrics that I would look at when looking at a marketing strategy for my business.

[00:12:13] Doug Heikkinen: What would you say to advisors who still rely on seminars, as you mentioned, webinars, referral networks, or buying leads. What are the limitations or pitfalls of those more traditional approaches?

[00:12:25] Alex Khassa: Yeah. I start off with all of those obviously can work for some people.

And each advisor has a choice of what kind of business they want to build. So nothing wrong, inherently with any of those strategies, but there are limitations. For example, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, with seminars, they can be a good ROI for some advisors if they're good presenters and all that.

But after doing that for 10, 20 years, it gets a little bit exhausting. So you might want to have other advisors do that for you, and it's a little bit more challenging. Because if they can present as well, they might have the idea one day that they can do their own thing as well. The issue with webinars, and I've spoken to one of the industries like reporting, partners that report on the effectiveness of each marketing strategy.

I've asked them at a conference recently, said, Hey, what's the lowest ROI strategy for a financial advisor that you've seen. And they work with, I'm guessing between 50 and a hundred clients. They said it's webinars for some reason they just weren't able to crack that. And it seems like webinars are an effective way of keeping the current people in your pipeline engaged and the current clients educating.

But to turn somebody who doesn't know who you are from just somebody passing by into a client, that doesn't seem to be working as well. The other issue is that you have to wait two to four weeks from the time that you're spending money until the time that you're having the webinar, so that it's like Schrodinger's cat.

is it going to be alive or dead, is it going to work or is it not going to work? You never know until you actually open the box, until you actually conduct a seminar or webinar. Versus with a strategy that you're able to get feedback daily. The feedback loop is more rapid versus webinars feedback loop is super stretched out. So it's more frustrating when you've spent thousands of dollars for two weeks and it's like nobody shows up or nobody books an appointment.

With referrals, if we're talking about custodial referrals, this week Schwab raised their minimum of 500,000 to a million. So that's, going to shake up a lot in the industry.

And a lot of businesses, especially smaller businesses, they had that in their growth plans that, Hey, I'm going to keep getting more of these referrals and things are going to be great. So that just reminds everybody that, hey, you need to work on diversifying your ways of getting clients and work on your own organic growth strategies.

Client referrals are always great. We love them. Easy to close. But they're limited, right? You can't get 10 times more client referrals, right? You should use them while you have them, but it's hard to grow and reach your growth goals that way. And buying leads, buying leads can be great if you don't want to deal with the compliance, right?

You're just like, Hey, here's a couple thousand bucks. Give me whatever amount of leads and I'll just figure it out from there. So that can be a great option for a lot of, a big section of the industry. If you can do your own marketing, I look at leads as the sawdust of advertising. The biggest output you get from advertising is the brand recognition that you build and the brand equity that you grow over time.

Let's say you spend $10,000 on ads. You get, I don't know, 200,000 impressions. And from that, let's say you get 30 appointments that are booked on your calendar. That's 30 of 200,000 people, right? So if you're just buying leads, you're just getting the 30, but you're not getting the 200,000 that now know who you are, and might do business with you in the future, but just haven't decided to book a meeting or become a lead yet.

While, a lot of the lead vendors over the past decade or so, they've built these big businesses because now everybody knows who they are and they're able to go to them to get matched with the financial advisor. Some of the biggest RIAs in the industry, they buy leads, but they also do their own marketing to build their own brand.

So what you're missing out on when you're buying leads is, not building your brand equity. Also the lead vendor is, but what are they doing to get leads? They're spending money on social media advertising in most cases, and they're selling you to lead at a decent markup for them to run their business.

You can do the same thing. You can spend your own money on social media advertising and get your own leads for probably a lesser markup through working with a partner or hiring internally. Whatever makes sense for you. Those are my thoughts on those options you gave right there.

[00:16:44] Doug Heikkinen: Great. What does performance branding mean in your framework, and how do you balance short term results and longer term brand equity?

[00:16:54] Alex Khassa: Yeah, performance branding is another way to describe what we do. It's the combination of performance marketing, which is another term for direct response marketing, which is, I'm going to spend a dollar to get a response back, to get a lead or an appointment or $2 or $3 back, right? Or all the above.

That's a little bit more aggressive, more direct. Hey, I want you to do this one thing. Branding often falls on the other side of the spectrum, which is I'm going to spend money not to necessarily get an output immediately, but just for people to know more about who we are, what we do, and how we can help them, and what they can experience if they use our brand.

For example, you never see an ad from Coca-Cola saying, Hey, buy this bottle of Coke, right? they're always trying to advertise their brand. That's an example of branding. Versus if you see any of the TV commercials, it's more super direct response. We are in the middle where we don't want to like completely annihilate your brand by saying some crazy stuff.

But also we don't want to just spend money just to spend money. We want to get a return while building your brand. So the way we do it is we have these specific targeted messages that we script for you, that you present with your face, with your logo, with your brand, on social media. And then you have, thousands of people seeing that video, hundreds clicking on it, and then maybe dozens turning into a booked appointment.

Now you got the appointments, but you also got the exposure to thousands or tens of thousands of people at the same time. So whether they decided to talk to you now or consider you for later or refer you to their friend, that's the dual benefit approach that you get from using, a strategy like ours.

That's what we call performance branding.

[00:18:35] Doug Heikkinen: It is not easy to build a business and then execute on that strategy, and you've done both and you should be very proud. So how has your business evolved as it's matured? Any interesting learnings?

[00:18:48] Alex Khassa: Yeah, no, that's a great question. We've grown our team and so far, the biggest learning is investing in the right kind of people that will help you grow and stay with you for the long term, has been the biggest learning for me personally. Finding the right copywriters, media buyers, video editors, tech integration specialists, project managers, data scientists, and strategists, has proven to be pretty expensive. I spend a lot of money on LinkedIn ads.

But also an interesting challenge to find the right people to help you execute the right way for a very niche, and complicated industry. Like compliance is a little different to each firm. The target demographic can be a little bit different for each firm. So finding the right people, and keeping them and training them has been the biggest lesson for me so far.

[00:19:48] Doug Heikkinen: Awesome. Where do you see the evolution of demand generation and financial services over the next five or so years? And here we go, how does AI fit in?

[00:19:57] Alex Khassa: Yeah, so demand generation over the next five years and AI, AI is going to make creating content easier. So now you can download Sora 2, if you haven't played with it yet, and just type in a prompt and it can create pretty decent video for you in minutes. So the cost to create content is going to go lower.

Number two, Facebook, actually their update this year, the moment you book an appointment with a financial advisor or you're interested in any service, they're going to show you every other ad that is spending enough to get in front of that same person.

So the prospect now that you get is more educated about their options. You're not the only person that's talking to them. So if what you're doing is more commoditized, you want to de-commoditize it by positioning it differently, which is a strategy that we change in our copywriting strategy this year to help our clients differentiate themselves when they're talking to their prospects.

That's where I'm seeing this year. The biggest updates is Meta is showing your prospects more options so that they make the better, best decision for them, right? And AI is going to help you create more content at a lower cost.

On our end, AI has helped us target the right people with that intent data, that we've recently explored over the past few, couple quarters. That's helped us drop our cost per booked appointment dramatically because now I'm not wasting a lot of my budget on people who are not interested. I'm only showing the ads to the people who are most interested, who meet my demographic criteria, but also have expressed intent by searching on social media or internet about these different keywords. So that's the current update of where I see things going.

[00:21:45] Doug Heikkinen: Great. Alex, thank you so much for being with us. What you've built is just fantastic and every advisor should know about it.

[00:21:53] Alex Khassa: Thank you. Thanks, Doug. Thank you for having me.

[00:21:55] Doug Heikkinen: For more information about Clients Blackbox, please visit them at clientsblackbox.com. We are all social media platforms @Advisorpedia. Please give us a follow. For our producer Tory Miller and everyone at Advisorpedia, thank you so much for listening.